Snowpiercer is the English-language debut by Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong (Mother, The Host), an action adventure set aboard a train that protects the remnants of humanity from a deep freeze that has, for 17 years, rendered Earth unfit for life. The cause of the calamity was some misguided attempt to battle global warning, but it doesn’t matter. Rather than an environmental theme, the story can be seen as a big parable of Marxism. (Or, it can just be seen as a violent action movie.)
At the back of the train are the least fortunate, forced into cramped quarters, and fed protein bars that look like slabs of blue gelatin, and made to listen to bizarre speeches about how each person has his place, or class. This last is delivered by Tilda Swinton, who gives an oddly entertaining performance as the representative of Wilbur, the trainmaster. She explains how each person’s lot depends on the type of ticket, with the first-class passengers in front. The language of trains — class, station — nicely reinforces the ideological themes of the film. it’s never quite explained how these passengers snagged the tickets —but metaphorically to the Planning the latest rebellion against this rigid regime is Curtis (Chris Bell), who hopes to take over the engine at the front of the train and, at least, get better food. And find the children who have been taken away. Naturally, the resistance is met with violence.
Suggesting its origins in a French graphic novel, the movie cycles through a variety of topics, styles, and themes, frequently suggesting other films. One character is supposedly clairvoyant, but it’s only a minor (and unnecessary, I’d say) plot element. The idea of eugenics is implied, but not specifically mentioned. In one sequence, a perky teacher teacher indoctrinates pre-teens in the ideology of the train and its benevolent leader, Wilbur, cheerfully reciting poetry about how everyone will freeze and die were they to go outside. Recalling to my mind Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, It’s such an over-the-top scene that it seems intended to provide comic relief. I also thought of The Poseidon Adventure, except that instead of moving, deck by deck, upward in a ship, Curtis’s motley crew traverse the train lengthwise, compartment by compartment. (One shot in the movie seems to be Bong’s direct tribute to a scene where Gene Hackman tries to steer the Poseidon by hanging on the steerting wheel.)
Mostly this is entertaining, though I had a hard time believing that Curtis’s rebellion would have gotten as far as it did, or that Curtis himself would be such a skilled fighter. It’s probably no coincidence that Bong films the key hand-to-hand combat sequence with slow-motion and other techniques that seem to obscure the extreme unlikelihood that the rebels could succeed. And the easily anticipated (but not altogether convincing) ending sidesteps the most pointed question implied by the story. That is, despite the cruelty of the train’s class system, would overturning it result in a worse situation, as with many a real-world revolution, that would imperil the survival of everyone on board? In other words, in a world of scarcity, what happens when no one will eat protein bars and everyone demands steak? Perhaps the film is an environmental parable after all.
IMDB link
viewed 7/6/14 1:20 pm at Roxy and posted 7/7
Showing posts with label graphic novel adaptation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label graphic novel adaptation. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Friday, November 11, 2011
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)
There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.
Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.
Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point. Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.
The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.
As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.
viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)
Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.
Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point. Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.
The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.
As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.
viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)
Friday, November 5, 2010
Tamara Drewe (***)
A small-town setting is a good way to bring together a collection of characters, and a newcomer is usually the best way to stir up some plot among them. Tamara is that character, a duckling-turned-swan journalist who’s returned to the English village where she unhappily grew up. A good Cinderella story is nearly irresistible, and irresistible is what Tamara (Gemma Arterton) has become since her recent nose job. Tamara is not so much the lead character as the one around whom all of the action revolves, though she’s a nice role for Atherton, recently the female lead in Prince of Persia. This particular village is a writer’s colony, currently populated by a pompous, adulterous mystery novelist (Christopher Hitchens lookalike Roger Allam) and his wife, an American with writer’s block, a pair of mischievous teen girls, and the guy who dumped the teenage Tamara. Soon enough, there’s a rock drummer. And there’s cows, lots of cows.
Based on a series of comics by Posey Simmonds, in turn based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd—the American writer is a Hardy scholar—the light comedy is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity). Neither farcical nor subtle, it’s a pleasant romp about a few people whose lives need sorting out. You’ll hardly notice it takes two hours to do so, even though what needs to be done is pretty obvious from the start. No, this won’t be the film at the top of Frears’s résumé. Tamara Drewe is neither Hardy nor hardy fare. It’s more like a piece of candy whose familiar taste makes it no less pleasing.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/10/2010
Based on a series of comics by Posey Simmonds, in turn based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd—the American writer is a Hardy scholar—the light comedy is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity). Neither farcical nor subtle, it’s a pleasant romp about a few people whose lives need sorting out. You’ll hardly notice it takes two hours to do so, even though what needs to be done is pretty obvious from the start. No, this won’t be the film at the top of Frears’s résumé. Tamara Drewe is neither Hardy nor hardy fare. It’s more like a piece of candy whose familiar taste makes it no less pleasing.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/10/2010
Friday, April 10, 2009
Tokyo! (**1/2)
Three directors, three segments.
The first part, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” is probably the best, and for most of its length the most conventional. The Tokyo Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) portrays is cramped and expensive, like many large cities. (The segment was adapted from a graphic novel called Cecil and Jordan in New York.) The main characters are a filmmaker and his girlfriend, who’ve just moved to the city and are temporarily sharing a friend’s tiny flat. Just as the plot and characters have been developed, though, it takes a turn for the fantastic, with the ending ultimately too abrupt and unsatisfying.
On the other hand, Leos Carax’s (Pola X) “Merde” was unsatisfying throughout. Featuring one of the most irritating central characters since Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered, a crazy red-haired dude who comes up from the sewers and creates mayhem, it’s the only segment featuring non-Japanese characters. Possibly it is saying something about the country’s cultural homogeneity. Or not.
Finally, Japan native Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Memories of Murder) presents “Shaking Tokyo,” the shortest and simplest segment, about the paradoxical isolation big-city residents can experience. Its central character is a hikkomori, a hermit who survives on a parental stipend and delivered food. A chance event leads to his first human interaction in ten years.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/14/09
The first part, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” is probably the best, and for most of its length the most conventional. The Tokyo Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) portrays is cramped and expensive, like many large cities. (The segment was adapted from a graphic novel called Cecil and Jordan in New York.) The main characters are a filmmaker and his girlfriend, who’ve just moved to the city and are temporarily sharing a friend’s tiny flat. Just as the plot and characters have been developed, though, it takes a turn for the fantastic, with the ending ultimately too abrupt and unsatisfying.
On the other hand, Leos Carax’s (Pola X) “Merde” was unsatisfying throughout. Featuring one of the most irritating central characters since Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered, a crazy red-haired dude who comes up from the sewers and creates mayhem, it’s the only segment featuring non-Japanese characters. Possibly it is saying something about the country’s cultural homogeneity. Or not.
Finally, Japan native Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Memories of Murder) presents “Shaking Tokyo,” the shortest and simplest segment, about the paradoxical isolation big-city residents can experience. Its central character is a hikkomori, a hermit who survives on a parental stipend and delivered food. A chance event leads to his first human interaction in ten years.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/14/09
Friday, January 18, 2008
Friday, March 9, 2007
300 (***)
? The title refers not to bowling, but to the number of Spartan soldiers who, with few allies, fought an overwhelmingly numerically superior invading Persian army at Thermopylae some 2500 years ago. Directed by Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), 300 takes as its source a graphic novel by Frank Miller (Sin City) and Lynn Varley. Miller, in turn, was inspired by 1962’s The 300 Spartans, which told the same story. Gerard Butler plays the fearsome Spartan king Leonidas, who spends much of the movie bare-chested, and Lena Headey his loyal (and nearly as fearsome) wife, who spends much of the movie trying to persuade the city-state’s council to send further reinforcements.
+ Unlike, say, Gladiator, 300 leans much more in the direction of action movie than history lesson or character drama. Its tight structure makes movies like Troy seem flaccid and overblown. Take, for example, the voiced-over introduction, depicting in a couple of minutes Leonidas’s boyhood immersion in the militaristic culture of his homeland. It’s at once over-the-top, captivatingly scary, and concise. Although not in the overt comic-book style of Sin City, most of the backgrounds are computer-generated so as to provide a slightly otherworldly look. When, early in the movie, Leonidas climbs a giant rock to seek the council of the Oracle of Delphi, the angle of ascent seems just on the impossible side. Leonidas himself appears to be nearly a giant, and Butler’s superb performance enhances the illusion. It’s easy to see why his men were so loyal. Although the meticulous depiction of violence is what will bring out the audience, the key plot elements are intelligently presented so as to make the strategy and the timeline of the battle understandable.
- I feared this might be a triumph of style over substance, and it isn’t, but it might be said that it’s a triumph of certitude over moral complexity. There may be practical value, and even glory, in the willingness to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but you get the feeling here that Leonidas’s men, as portrayed here, see glory in death itself. They can hardly be said to be brave, because they seem fearless. I saw a parallel with the Japan of World War II. In a sense, 300 embraces the death-before-surrender ethos that Letters from Iwo Jima implicitly criticized. To go along with this attractive vision of a warrior culture, 300 also emphasizes the Spartan contempt for “inferior” individuals. One of the ways the movie departs from strict realism is in featuring exaggerated human grotesqueries, none of whom is portrayed positively. The Spartans are shown to kill abnormally formed babies at birth, but in one scene a hunchback of cartoonish proportions appears. He offers to fight for Leonidas, but the great king says that he is useless. On the Persian side are, among others, a robotic giant and a person with, where an arm should be, a fin used to execute. The Persian leader, Xerxes, looks like a transvestite with a piercing fetish. (Admittedly, the imagery is striking.) The masses of Persian soldiers are portrayed as nearly inhuman hordes, and the Spartans clearly feel superior to other Greeks as well. Leonidas and his men are cast as proto-democratic freedom fighters, but that’s a stretch. It might not be fair to judge ancients by modern standards, but 300 mythologies its subjects to such an extent that it appears to endorse attitudes that, should they pause consider them, many in the audience might well find repugnant.
= *** Notwithstanding the above reservations, cinematically 300 delivers the goods and probably met the testosterone-fueled expectations of the startling number of people who went to see it on its opening weekend.
IMDB link
reviewed 3/16/07
+ Unlike, say, Gladiator, 300 leans much more in the direction of action movie than history lesson or character drama. Its tight structure makes movies like Troy seem flaccid and overblown. Take, for example, the voiced-over introduction, depicting in a couple of minutes Leonidas’s boyhood immersion in the militaristic culture of his homeland. It’s at once over-the-top, captivatingly scary, and concise. Although not in the overt comic-book style of Sin City, most of the backgrounds are computer-generated so as to provide a slightly otherworldly look. When, early in the movie, Leonidas climbs a giant rock to seek the council of the Oracle of Delphi, the angle of ascent seems just on the impossible side. Leonidas himself appears to be nearly a giant, and Butler’s superb performance enhances the illusion. It’s easy to see why his men were so loyal. Although the meticulous depiction of violence is what will bring out the audience, the key plot elements are intelligently presented so as to make the strategy and the timeline of the battle understandable.
- I feared this might be a triumph of style over substance, and it isn’t, but it might be said that it’s a triumph of certitude over moral complexity. There may be practical value, and even glory, in the willingness to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but you get the feeling here that Leonidas’s men, as portrayed here, see glory in death itself. They can hardly be said to be brave, because they seem fearless. I saw a parallel with the Japan of World War II. In a sense, 300 embraces the death-before-surrender ethos that Letters from Iwo Jima implicitly criticized. To go along with this attractive vision of a warrior culture, 300 also emphasizes the Spartan contempt for “inferior” individuals. One of the ways the movie departs from strict realism is in featuring exaggerated human grotesqueries, none of whom is portrayed positively. The Spartans are shown to kill abnormally formed babies at birth, but in one scene a hunchback of cartoonish proportions appears. He offers to fight for Leonidas, but the great king says that he is useless. On the Persian side are, among others, a robotic giant and a person with, where an arm should be, a fin used to execute. The Persian leader, Xerxes, looks like a transvestite with a piercing fetish. (Admittedly, the imagery is striking.) The masses of Persian soldiers are portrayed as nearly inhuman hordes, and the Spartans clearly feel superior to other Greeks as well. Leonidas and his men are cast as proto-democratic freedom fighters, but that’s a stretch. It might not be fair to judge ancients by modern standards, but 300 mythologies its subjects to such an extent that it appears to endorse attitudes that, should they pause consider them, many in the audience might well find repugnant.
= *** Notwithstanding the above reservations, cinematically 300 delivers the goods and probably met the testosterone-fueled expectations of the startling number of people who went to see it on its opening weekend.
IMDB link
reviewed 3/16/07
Friday, May 19, 2006
Art School Confidential (**3/4)
The second collaboration of director Terry Zwigoff with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes spends its first third humorously skewering the art-world, its second exploring romantic longing, and its last being derailed by a silly serial-killer subplot.
This comedy-drama represents the second collaboration of
director Terry Zwigoff with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. The first, the
funny and heartbreaking Ghost World, is one of my favorite movies.
There’s a subplot about an art teacher that, in about 15 minutes of screen
time, makes most of the points about the art world that this one does in about
two hours. The main character (Max Minghella) here is not a quirky teenage
girl, but a semi-normal teenage boy hoping to score with a quirky art-school
girl as well as become a real artist. Not surprisingly, his drawings look a lot
like those of Clowes, or of Ghost World’s Enid. Like Enid, Jerome finds
his representational work shunned in favor of technically dodgy works deemed to
be more “expressive.
The art-teacher was probably the most broadly comedic one
in Ghost World, and the early parts of Art School Confidential
aren’t that far from many Hollywood comedies. A friend introduces Jerome to the
various “types” that populate the school (the credits include “bearded weirdo,”
“future critic,” “angry lesbian,” and “vegan holy man”), not to mention the
crazy, drunk “genius” (Jim Broadbent) who tells him art school’s a waste of
time. Meanwhile, he’s smitten with a girl (Sophia Myles) he’s seen naked (as a
model) but seems untouchable. Comedy gives way to pathos and, though the source
is familiar, the way that romantic disappointment translates to broad despair
is palpable. There is then a certain subplot that unexpectedly, and
unfortunately, comes to the fore, something about a serial killer running amok
on campus. This absurdist, absurd development overwhelms the story and brings
it to an ending that I found clumsy and unsatisfying, though not enough to ruin
the movie.
Friday, March 17, 2006
V for Vendetta (***1/4)
Moving on from the Matrix trilogy, the Wachowski brothers score with another near-future tale set in a London ruled by a fascist.
After the mediocre Matrix sequels, I was happy to
have the Wachowskis moving on to a new franchise. They’ve adapted Alan Moore
and David Lloyd’s 1989 graphic novel (though not directed it) into a smart
thriller that restores the balance between ideas and plot that made the
original Matrix appealing. It’s set sometime in the near future in
London, where the prime minister has been replaced by an iron-fisted chancellor
(John Hurt) who’s exploited the fear generated by a recent plague. (The U.S.
has apparently undergone an even worse calamity, but we don’t learn the
details.)
Of the movie’s two major characters, one is wearing a mask the entire
time; the other is played by Natalie Portman. She’s the office-drone
counterpart to Keanu Reeves in the first Matrix movie who’s likewise
offered a choice between risk and complacency by a pretentious, powerful
stranger. She doesn’t like the repressive government, but is understandably
troubled by the mystery man’s extreme methods of opposing it. A startling
development forces her to decide whether his targeted terrorism is justified.
The movie gets a little slow in the second half. It’s not an action movie, and
in some ways reminded me more of Batman Begins than anything. However,
in that movie, the masked man didn’t believe in assassination. There are all
kinds of political parallels you can draw, but it works just fine as a
standalone story.
posted 9/6/13
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